MICHAEL MORRIS: Thankfully history churns ceaselessly - Business Day
Michael Morris
I well remember how, as the 1980s dragged on, writing about SA and its fundamental unignorables — all those problems that were as obvious as they were perennially in need of urgent attention — often suffered from tedious repetition.
Sometimes, I suppose, the ideas will have seemed less than vivid or stimulating simply for being unthinkable, improbable, “unreal”. What was the point of harping on about such plainly utopian fantasies as, for example, a universal franchise?
Get real, someone would suggest. And reality was understood, broadly speaking, to mean what was possible. That a case could be made for something new or different as a genuinely rational and desirable alternative didn’t mean it was feasible. And if you wanted to be considered a credible participant in any meaningful conversation, you had at least to demonstrate a grasp of “reality”.
Yet, history churns ceaselessly. Little by little society does actually change its mind, people think differently and choose differently as they weigh new ideas or consider their fate. In time, what once seemed implausible becomes ordinary, taken for granted.
We can be thankful for that — and the new year is a good time for remembering it.
My former senior colleague Frans Cronje once drew on key events in our recent history to demonstrate the risk of missing what was actual enough yet hard to see, or perhaps hard to accept.
The near future, he suggested, would have been inconceivable to the 1985 National Party conference audience that applauded PW Botha’s notorious Rubicon speech (though some, we know, were appalled) in which, spurning the advice of the reformist-minded few in his circle, he defiantly declared that he was “not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on the road to abdication and suicide”.
Yet as Cronje pointed out, none among PW’s most ardent admirers in Durban in August 1985, or his legions of devotees around the country, would have foreseen that within just over a decade “the last NP leader would be the tourism minister in an ANC cabinet that would cut interest rates in half, produce the [Growth, Employment & Redistribution] policy and take the economic growth rate back to 5%”.
It’s also true, of course, that history takes its time, and change itself can seem improbable in the maddeningly slow course of events.
How ironic, for example, that I first wrote about Cronje’s thoughts on the unforeseeable at the end of November 2017. Who, now, remembers how portentous that moment was? At the time it certainly was — or could have been.
Would Cyril Ramaphosa gain the ANC leadership and become president — and launch the reforms vital to SA’s long-awaited renewal — or would it be Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, and just more of the same, racial nationalism, “radical” socialism, dysfunction and decline?
Well, Ramaphosa won, but that renewal is still outstanding. Except, history does churn. As Cronje argued at the time, it’s not the short-term trends but “longer-term patterns and dynamics” that would shape “the choices and room for manoeuvre of whoever emerges as ANC leader”.
These included credible polling showing that South Africans were more inclined to moderate opinions than economic and political populism and racial nationalism; the importance of household wellbeing rather than headlines about politics or corruption; resentment at unmet expectations of that long-promised better life for all, and the inescapable truth that such expectations could never be met without structural reforms that expanded liberty and triggered economic growth.
Can anyone doubt that this is where we remain today? Whoever seriously questions these fundamentals is simply dabbling in fantasy.
• Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.